Stat Spotlight: Charting Missouri's 2nd-half offense when the game is in limbo

Thursday

Oct 31, 2013 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2013 at 8:00 AM

David Morrison

Missouri led South Carolina by 14 at the half and 17 in the third quarter on Saturday.

The Tigers have been there before this season.

South Carolina staged a comeback to make things a little tighter than they were at the half.

The Tigers have been there before this year as well, most notably against Toledo, Georgia and Florida.

Yet Missouri was able to hold off all those comebacks. How come the Tigers weren't able to keep the Gamecocks at bay?

We turned to the offensive stats to find out, mostly because -- when Missouri has been on this year -- it's been because the Tigers were able to build a cushion with the offense, then hold serve for the rest of the game.

We took the Tigers' offensive stats for all eight games this season from when each game was within 17 points in the second half, as it was against South Carolina on Saturday.

We did it from halftime -- rather than, say, the start of the fourth quarter -- because we wanted a bit larger sample size to see if we could pull tendencies.

The results are below, in the spreadsheet form you've come to know and love (loathe?):

Alright, so what do we got here? What went wrong against South Carolina?

Here are some handy bullet points to use as guides:

High run percentage: Missouri ran a higher percentage of the time (63.6 percent) than in any game in this similar situation, save for the Toledo game (80 percent). Through all games this season when placed in similar situations, Missouri has run 60.1 percent of the time. That, in and of itself, isn't a big problem. It certainly wasn't in the Toledo game. Except when you couple it with... No run game: Missouri averaged only 3.3 yards a carry on its 21 second-half carries against South Carolina, its second-worst performance among similar situations this season. The Toledo game carried a 5.1 per-carry average, so Missouri was getting nearly 2 two more yards every time it ran when it was leaning on its run game. The only worse ground showing was at Georgia, when the Tigers averaged 2.8 yards a carry in a similar situation. They still won that game. That's because they didn't have... Trouble completing passes: The Tigers completed a mere 33.3 percent of their passes in the second half and overtime against South Carolina. That was their worst showing among similar situations on the year, coming behind Toledo's 42.9-percent mark. For a team that has completed 60 percent of its passes in similar situations overall, that's quite the departure. The Georgia mark was 76.9 percent. The Florida mark, Maty Mauk's first start, was 61.5 percent. Missouri seemed hesitant to let Mauk ice the game by throwing because he wasn't being efficient. Which led to... A bunch of nothing plays: Nearly half -- 15 -- of the 33 plays Missouri ran in the second half and overtime went for no yards or fewer. That includes eight incompletions, so the Tigers also had seven plays in which they got the ball in someone's hands, but it yielded nothing. Contrast that with the Toledo game, when -- even though James Franklin was struggling to complete passes and the Tigers were content to pound the ball on the ground -- only seven of their 35 plays went for nothing or a loss, with four coming on incompletions. Those are drive-killers, things that usually mean you're... Not responding with scores: Missouri had eight drives to try to put the game away against South Carolina and only scored on two of them, one coming in overtime. That was a decidedly subpar performance from an offense that had been able to score on 61.3 of drives in similar situations in seven previous games. The Tigers had answers on all four crunch-time drives against Arkansas State, all three against Vanderbilt and five of six against Florida. The closest approximation to the futility it experienced against South Carolina came against Georgia, when it scored on only two of seven such drives. But Missouri also had something against Georgia that it didn't against South Carolina. Namely... The defensive complement: This isn't on the spreadsheet, but let's plow ahead anyway. When Missouri was nearing the end of its dogfight (pun intended) with Georgia, the defense came up with a third-down sack for a punt and an interception to help matters immensely. Against South Carolina, the Tigers gave up scores on each of the Gamecocks' final five drives, allowing 202 yards on 39 plays. Those 5.2 yards-per-play against aren't that terrible, but Missouri also allowed the Gamecocks to convert five of their eight third- and fourth-down tries (62.5 percent). Those just kept drives going and going. Or, in the case of 4th-and-15, delivered gut punches that were hard to come back from. Only once did South Carolina fail to follow up a third-down fail with a fourth-down conversion. That came on the eventual game-winning field goal from Elliott Fry.